Over 1,000 NHS trust staff have spent more than £8 million on a new procurement platform, The Edge4Health, in the past three months.
Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, Cambridgeshire Community Services NHS Trust, Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust and Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust were the first organisations to go live with The Edge4Health – developed by NHS Shared Business Services and Virtualstock
Alan Hoskins, director of procurement at NHS South of England Procurement Services, said: “Some of the key attractions of The Edge4Health for procurement teams across the NHS are that it’s an intuitive consumer-style platform, which helps hospital staff to easily buy products against a contract, and means far less procurement team time is spent on the admin around managing catalogues.
“We were particularly keen to enhance the user experience for those within our own Trust by providing them with an efficient, easy-to-use system. A big positive for us is having supplier-managed catalogues to enable the reallocation of resource – to allow our team to do more valuable work with suppliers around contract negotiations and monitoring, as well as more on the reporting side.”
The Edge4Health has been designed and tested to ensure it meets the specific requirements of NHS organisations across the country. It is also fully-aligned to national NHS procurement programmes.
NHS Shared Business Services is a 50-50 joint venture between the Department of Health and Social Care and IT consultancy Sopra Steria.
